Adam Smith’s praise of the Caliphate

Adam Smith, the 18th Century founder of modern economics whose picture is printed on the current UK £20 note, was exceedingly inspired by the Islamic method of governing. He proclaimed that:

“…the empire of the Caliphs seems to have been the first state under which the world enjoyed that degree of tranquillity which the cultivation of the sciences requires. It was under the protection of those generous and magnificent princes, that the ancient philosophy and astronomy of the Greeks were restored and established in the East; that tranquillity, which their mild, just and religious government diffused over their vast empire, revived the curiosity of mankind, to inquire into the connecting principles of nature.” *